New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

Twitter Updates

Twitter Accounts

Facebook

Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

April 13, 2009

Why Twitter Rules (and What to Do About It)

In the
past few months, the Twitter phenomenon has reached epic proportions.
Personally, I chalk this up to the malaise that is gripping us all as
we struggle to make sense of both the economic crisis and the political
seismic shifts that are upon us. Not content to consume news media and
blogs, we now all want to make sense of it, to share our observations,
and most of all to connect. So this odd 140-character microblogging
platform, known as Twitter, has ballooned in importance. In the last
week, the Financial Times
published a full-page article about Twitter. U.S. Congresspeople
tweeted during Obama’s speech to the joint houses of Congress, and
Keith Olbermann’s CountDown described the Congressional "Twits tweeting," and John Stewart ran a great spoof on the new Congressional pastime of tweeting.
(The software is called Twitter; the short messages you send are called
“tweets.” And yes, anyone who IS anyone is doing it.) The best way to
get up to speed on Twitter in my opinion is to use the Twitter How To's
and links at Mashable. Feel free to drop me a note. My twitter handle is pattyinboothbay.

How Should Your Company Deal with Twitter?

No matter what your personal opinion is about this phenomenon/fad, you
should take note about how your customers and prospects are using
Twitter and how your company should be engaging with them using this
popular tool.

1. Best Use of Twitter: Real-Time Customer Support. The
best way to win the hearts and minds of customers and prospects is to
set up a twitter search filter on your company’s and product’s name(s)
and to ensure that your customer support organization is tracking and
responding to these tweets in real time. Oddly enough, when someone is
stuck in line at an airport, having trouble with your Web site, or
having difficulty using your product, they are highly likely to tweet
about it (before they send you an email or call your support line or
while they’re doing so). It’s an easy way for people to vent
frustration and reach out to the world. If your customer support team
responds quickly, both with a public tweet (so others will know you’re
listening) and with a Direct Message to offer personal assistance, you
will not only solve that customer’s issue but have that positive
experience re-tweeted. Here are a couple of good examples:

• Andybeal: Ordered from Office Depot
for the first time—won’t use them again. No delivery Thurs—too busy to
deliver. Friday? No explanation & no package

• edwinaoki: Comcast outage. Can't get to anything east of Denver. They say "they hope to have it fixed by 8pm". That's 13 hours!

• TESFox: I have to say, Comcast is doing an excellent job of being there for customer service. Hats off for @comcastcares and the live chat team!

2. Planning and Managing Events. Whatever
event you’re planning—whether it’s a local gathering of wine
connoisseurs, a training class, a big user conference or a new product
launch, Twitter should be part of your pre-, during and post-event
communications plan. You can create a buzz before the event and
encourage participants to tweet their notes, impressions and commentary
during the event, and buzz after the event. You can make it easy for
groupies and participants to retweet by providing hashtags (#ourevent)
that they can embed in each tweet to make it easy to filter and search.

3. New Product Launches. Twitter
is a great way to get the word out in seductive and non-intrusive ways
about upcoming new products or services. Most companies offer a limited
number of “beta invites” via Twitter. These become coveted and people
start asking for them so they can be part of the in crowd.

• utopiah: @tonylucas a friend told me I should ask for a beta invite,
since Im curious about cloud computing services, here I tweet ;)

4. Customer Outreach and Gentle Evangelism.
Many brand managers have managed to find the perfect tone in their
Tweets. They don’t barrage you with blatant PR or marketing. They ask
for reactions. They thank you when you DO tweet about their products or
brands. They float ideas. They engage with people.

• angie1234p: @RockYourDay Morning Dave. Have I got news for you lol Molson Canadian is on Twitter (@MolsonFerg) Thought you might find it interesting :) [PBS: Fans notice your presence!]

• BlakeSunshine: @jessiecarp I work at National Instruments on www.ni.com/community- hope your semester is off to a great start

5. Drive Traffic to Your Site, Blog, E-Store, YouTube. Apart
from free give-aways, twitterers don’t appreciate blatant product
pitches. They’ll “unfollow” you quickly. But we do love to pass around
links to great funny videos, useful commentary, insightful analysis,
useful tips and tricks. Make sure that your contributions include
seductive links that people will value.

• artrox: RT @thebrandbuilder @alydesigns @peopledesign: '5 Lessons in Business Innovation' http://tinyurl.com/bnwmvb
(design around your customer) [PBS: Note the ReTweet—being passed
along—also the use of a “tinyurl” which saves space]

• it_world: The cloud and the public sector - water and oil?: Public sector CIOs should look to the leading cloud computing .. http://tinyurl.com/d7hmep

• doingmedia: @christinawodtke Congrats on the 2nd edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Webhttp://ping.fm/Tlv8A

6. Monitor Your Brand/Reputation. Twitter
is the least expensive and most effective way to track your brand’s
reputation online. You can just set up a search filter, turn the feed
into an RSS feed (so you can capture and analyze it as it flies by) and
then take actions to improve customer experience and/or amplify the
good vibes.

• tivogrrl: “Enjoyed seeing USAA at Mx 2009. They are a financial services company that really gets customer service.”

• AdayVA: “@VistaPrint Thanks for ease of use and great customer service :)”

• richsharples: “Innovation loves a crisis, but only after customer
have stepped out from under their desks” - classic Jonathan Schwartz
quote [PBS: Jonathan Schwartz is the CEO of Sun—monitor execs’ names as
well as company, brand and product names]

What if you are in charge of monitoring all search and social media
activity around your products and your brands and constantly tuning
your brand’s SEO and site merchandising? Ideally, you want an
integrated approach for monitoring, analyzing, and taking action on the
searches, tweets, blog posts, and buzz that’s swirling around your
brand and your products. There are two keys to success:

1. Put the responsibility to monitor, analyze, and take action in the
hands of a single coordinated team, don’t silo it across your firm’s
PR, social media, e-commerce, SEO and site search, product and
promotion merchandising, and customer support teams. Things move fast.
You need to be able to get in front of the customer parade, not behind
it! It’s fine to have distributed responsibilities for analyzing,
tracking, and acting on customers’ buzz, interactions, and activity,
but you’ll want to function as a virtual team, and ideally to use an
integrated platform—one that lets you spot trends quickly and take
action quickly.

2. Provide your team with integrated tools that let you monitor and
analyze activity in real time across all of the different internal and
external traffic sources that you monitor—those you control and those
you don’t control.

The good news is that the leading-edge search analytics and
e-merchandising platforms are embracing the leading edge social media
trends.

Omniture Embraces Twitter

One of the top search analytics and e-merchandising platforms—the one
used by the majority of large brands—is Omniture. It’s good news that
the Mercedes Benz of e-commerce search and merchandising is moving with
Porsche-like agility to embrace the leading edge social media platform.
In a Mashable blog post, entitled: Omniture Adds Twitter Analytics for Brands, Jennifer Van Grove writes:

“You could try one of these 10 reputation tracking tools,
but Omniture’s already powerful analytics product, SiteCatalyst, is now
the first of its kind to actually import Twitter data for better
measurement of brand activity. Omniture’s already powerful analytics
product, SiteCatalyst, is now the first of its kind to actually import
Twitter data for better measurement of brand activity.

Omniture currently boasts 5,100 clients—think AOL, Microsoft, Oracle,
and eBay—capturing more than 1 trillion online transactions per
quarter, and is now hoping to support their clients looking for Twitter
insights on par with the standard Web analytics they’re used to
receiving.

After importing Twitter data into SiteCatalyst, Omniture customers will
be able to identify brand advocates and detractors, better acknowledge
feature requests from loyal users, categorize Twitterers as customers,
vendors, or employees, and get real-time alerts via email or SMS based
on specified criteria like spikes in brand mentions. Users will even be
able to generate limitless keyword reports - via tweet text scanning -
to further segment, analyze, and dissect Twitter-related brand data.”

We are working on integrating Twitter into the storytelling of a series of webisodes to enhance the engagement of the viewers and to create a community around the content. Web video and communities go hand in hand.